Our first Open House and Company Picnic—in 2002—was held in the back yard of our first production office and studio at Lovelace Crossroads—a brick ranch-style house located just north of Florence, Alabama. We invited our staff, our artisans, their families, and anyone else in the community that wanted to join us for an afternoon of what we lovingly call “Dinner on the Ground.” And so they came with blankets and quilts and fold-out chairs—our families, our neighbors, and folks that heard what we were doing and wanted to know just what we were up to in that little house.

We spread our blankets and filled picnic tables with food, potluck-style. It was a time to show off your famous cinnamon rolls or cook your grandmother’s famous fried chicken recipe. It felt magical, moving from one picnic blanket to the next, meeting one another’s loved ones that we’d all heard so much about. It was a day of blue skies and music. There were children and grandchildren, spouses, grandparents, best friends, and dogs—most with plates full of potato salad, barbecue, biscuits, and pie.

Friends and neighbors came and went, but many of us stayed for hours—telling stories and more stories. As afternoon turned to evening, we rolled up blankets and packed up the leftovers (there are almost always leftovers; as Southerners, it’s against our raising to run out of food). We were all stuffed, a little pink from the sun, and satisfied.

That was the first of many picnics. Each year, there were new faces and always many friends. There was often music and always laughter. Times changed, and we moved from Lovelace Crossroads to The Factory in 2007 but we never forgot that Alabama Chanin is deeply a part of this community and that we want our community to remain deeply connected to us.

Here is what we have going on this week, Monday, March 30 – Saturday, April 4:

STORE
Make plans now to join us for our Community Picnic on Saturday, April 11. Festivities of the day will include a pot-luck style picnic (bring your favorite side dish or dessert), guided tours of the studio, and one-hour mini-workshops.

In our week-long profile of designers Charles and Ray Eames, we studied their design aesthetic and philosophy and talked about the various media they used to forward those philosophies. They made hundreds of explorations into film, for varied purposes. Produced in 1977, Powers of Ten is perhaps their best-known film—and includes a book version. In it, the Eamses utilized the system of exponential powers to demonstrate the importance of scale.

The premise of the film is simple, though its scope is wide: a narrator—physicist Philip Morrison—guides the viewer on a journey that begins with an overhead shot of a couple in a park. The camera then pans back to see what a ten-meter distance looks like, then 100 meters, then 1,000 meters. Every 10 seconds, the viewer’s distance from the initial scene of the couple is magnified tenfold. We expand to the point of 100 million light years from Earth, a field of view of 1024 meters—the size of the observable universe.

As we wrote in last week’s post on our DIY Exploding Zero T-Shirt, inspiration comes at us from every direction. Recently, our design team has been (almost endlessly) inspired by Eames: Beautiful Details. The use of color and form shown by Ray and Charles Eames is bright and modern, even by today’s standards. The image shown above at left inspired the swatch above right, and can be recreated using the basic instructions below in any combination of colors and techniques you choose. This is a perfect project for our Fat Eighths or scraps from your own stash.

…the role of the architect, or the designer, is that of a very good, thoughtful host, all of whose energy goes into trying to anticipate the needs of his guests—those who enter the building and use the objects in it. – Charles Eames

Our favorite Eames quote above is now on our café tables, the production cutting room, and displayed front and center on our design room inspiration board. I looked at the pages above and tried to imagine what Charles and Ray would have served in their gorgeous mid-century kitchen. The kitchens of my 1960s childhood were inspired (through trickle-down design) by Charles and Ray Eames—who sought specifically to target the needs of the average American family.

And the American family was changing from the mid-1950s through the 1960s and 1970s. Where cookbooks in the 1950s advised women to have dinner ready for their husbands when they got home from work, moving into the 1960s they began to offer recipes for busy moms. You could now make dinner by opening cans and boxes of prepared foods. That meant a lot of casseroles and inventing creative ways to use canned foods like soup, tuna, and even SPAM. The food fads of the day leant a sense of the exotic and the exciting to the dining room. Fondue, Chinese woks, Julia Child’s advocacy of French cooking, and…all Jell-O everything—brought about food inventions the likes of which had never been seen.

For those who want to relive the good old days of Chicken a la King, ambrosia or gelatin salads, meatballs with grape jelly, onion soup dip, cheese balls, or Baked Alaska, we recommend visiting Mid-Century Menu or, my personal favorite, White Trash Cooking—for a treasure of Jell-O based recipes.

For everything else, we defer to the queen of the Mid-century kitchen: Miss Julia Child.

Learn more about the Eames, Mid-Century design, and the love the kitchen, purchase Eames: Beautiful Details, pictured above and now available from our online store. (Natalie’s personal copy shown here photographed by Abraham Rowe)

Last summer, friend Lisa Fox hosted our first Alabama Chanin Pop-up Shop at her East Village store, lf8, for Makeshift 2014 and New York Design Week. After a run at Billy Reid Austin over the holidays, our indigo collection is available at lf8 in New York this spring. The shop features our one-of-a-kind, hand-dyed indigo pieces alongside our A. Chanin machine-made line, Heath + Alabama Chanin collaboration, accessories, books, and more.

Readings, workshops, Makeshift conversations, and special events will take place over the course of the two months–more details to come. Visit here to see last year’s programming and learn more about Makeshift.

Alabama Chanin @ lf8 through May 22nd:

80 E. 7th Street
New York, NY 10003

Store Hours:
Tuesday–Sunday 12:00pm–6:00pm
Closed Mondays

Follow @alabamachanin and @lf8_elevate on Instagram for updates.

For more information, contact: sales (at) alabamachanin.com, or call, +646.861.2837

All of us, at one time or another, have associated the idea of work with a sense of dread. We’ve all had a job we thought was boring, repetitive, mindless, stressful; we’d zone out or procrastinate because, in our hearts, we weren’t invested. In such a situation, we were taught to create a time for work and a time for play: work/life balance.

The downside of this idea of work/life balance is that playtime is often interrupted with thoughts of work; and work time is spent dreaming of play. Mr. Rogers once said, “Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning.” This is certainly true of how the Eames ran their studio and the basis of the important, and playful, work of Ellen Langer.

The last decades have taught us (and our children) that to achieve is the ultimate goal—often to the detriment of play. When we think of play, we think of “time wasting” or “unnecessary.” But play can also meld the possible with the magical. When we play, we aren’t necessarily bound by limits; we are free. Most of us have notions as to what defines work and play – but those categories aren’t independent of one another. Ellen Langer states it so simply, “When we are at work, we’re people; when we’re at play, we’re still people.”

The new saying at my house and at the studio: It’s not hard work, it’s GOOD work. There is a big difference between the two.